Posted
by
BeauHDon Thursday May 12, 2016 @09:00AM
from the threats-to-human-labor dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: A new report from PwC finds that drones could replace $127 billion worth of human labor and services across several industries. Infrastructure and agriculture make up the largest chunks of the potential value -- some $77.6 billion between them -- including services like completing the last mile of delivery routes and spraying crops with laser-like precision. Economists seem to agree that robot automation poses real threats to human labour within the next few decades. Drones are a cheap, versatile first step toward that future. According to the new PwC report, they're also a solid cost-cutting measure. Along with infrastructure and agriculture, drones will help tech giants like Amazon deliver packages, allow security companies to better monitor their sites, help producers and advertisers to film projects, allow telecommunication firms to easily check on their towers, and give mining companies a new way to plan their digs.

but from what I've seen here on/. the past few years, all it will take to screw it up is one bad actor and *boom*. So while I also express some discomfort for the thought of the adjustment period, I do wonder how all of these new robot pals are going to be secured against turning them into weapons (dropping packages from unsafe heights) or avoid industrial sabotage (by having their blades chop the crops they're supposed to be dusting or reporting they've dusted the crops when no such thing happened or being hijacked to go dust the local busy shopping center instead of the crops).

I don't expect things to be perfect out of the box but if the US military occasionally has trouble how are we going to be protecting ourselves?

I don't expect things to be perfect out of the box but if the US military occasionally has trouble how are we going to be protecting ourselves?

I used to prefer a Mossberg 535 because it's cheap, reliable and it can fire 3 1/2 in shells for extra range but receny I've grown partial to the method this guy used to solve his drone problem [youtube.com].

Yeah, we should ban cotton gins, and combine harvesters, and horse-drawn PLOWS, for God's sake!

Think how many more people we could employ if we didn't use horses to plow the fields, or allowed men to pick cotton seeds out of the cotton by hand the way they were meant to.

It's always interesting seeing the Luddites using a technology that didn't exist 50 years ago to natter about how some new technology is going to destroy civilization. I mean, it's not like the computer industry didn't put MILLIONS of tel

The most common usages of drone are for Predator-type vehicles used by the military and battery powered multicopters used by hobbyists and others for short-range, low-payload close in flights.

The former are extremely expensive pilotless airplanes backed by a large ground infrastructure with unique capabilities (like their own satellites). The latter are relatively inexpensive, but for the most part can't carry more than small video camera and can't travel all that far.

Based on the breathless summary of this article, they make it sound like we already have the equivalent of the former in the packaging and cost of the latter, just waiting to take off with a hundred or so gallons of pesticide or able to travel 10+ miles delivering heavy packages with precision.

Do we? Are there available commercial civilian drones that can be operated by 1-2 people able to actually do the job of a crop duster? That's about the number of people it takes to keep a crop duster flying -- a pilot and a mechanic, and they can carry enough chemicals to spray a many acres in a single flight. The Amazon thing sounds even more ridiculous, the equivalent of a small helicopter in terms of range and lift capacity.

To me this reads like wishful thinking or science fiction. "Robots could do these jobs.." Sure, but first show me the robot you've invented that can do them. I don't doubt the pilotless cropdusters are technologically possible -- you could just put in remote controls in an actual plane or helicopter, but probably not cheaper and easier than you could just hire someone to fly the thing.

The most common usages of drone are for Predator-type vehicles used by the military and battery powered multicopters used by hobbyists and others for short-range, low-payload close in flights.The former are extremely expensive pilotless airplanes backed by a large ground infrastructure with unique capabilities (like their own satellites).

Please define extremely expensive. It is possible to build something similar to a Predator for less than the median price of a new car. The military is paying for the advanced airframe, which is irrelevant to the mission if not being shot at.

A fixed-wing drone with a four foot wingspan can reasonably loiter and shoot video for half an hour to an hour, using a combination of GPS and inertial navigation... for just a few hundred dollars.

The latter are relatively inexpensive, but for the most part can't carry more than small video camera and can't travel all that far.

A $120 quadcopter can lift a SLR... or a grenade. And subsequently press

It appears that you aim to win an internet argument based on the fact that few people know what exactly the word "airframe" means or does not mean.

It appears that you aim to coddle people who can find slashdot.org but not dictionary.com. And also post this shit as an AC like a cowardly bitch. I support neither stance.

The truth is that most of what makes the predator expensive is that it can take some fire. If you just want to fly a long way, shoot some video, drop some ordnance, and fly back, it will cost you a fuck of a lot less than a Predator.

In the real world, much of the official cost includes things like satellite links and ground stations

The per-unit cost is significant, and meanwhile, a civilian will just use the cellular network for that. It's not as good as having a dedicated radio network, but as long as you have the element of surprise you can expect it to remain switched on.

Just once I'd like to see a technological revolution where the CEOs are replaced by technology *before* the labor pool.

You won't see robots outlawed until robots start replacing lawyers. Lawyers tend to control the law in their favor, so, once you have technology replacing lawyers, that's when the revolution really comes.

But I always find it funny that technology replaces every person, except the most useless person in the entire organization, and that's the overpaid, underworked CEO who's only concern about the company is what the stock price is at that very second.

Half of the CEOs in this country can't even tell you what their company *does* -- and yet they get paid more than the entire labor force of the company combined; and continually look for ways to increase their income while decreasing the income of everyone else.

Replace CEOs with a chatbot that can play golf, and you'll notice no difference in the running of the firm. And save million of dollars in compensation.

I've always wanted to start a CEO outsourcing company, where we replace the CEO with a small team of MBAs from India. Charge 1/10 what the old CEO made and still make out like bandits. One team could comfortably service multiple clients at the same time as well.

This isn't going to happen anytime soon because of the energy requirements. It's not like cellphones, tablets, and laptops that can be made more efficient with better chips and even profiling the energy requirements of the software. Moving mass around has long-known energy requirements and today's batteries simply can't deliver that kind of power.

Maybe it's time the non-Luddites wake up and small the machine-made coffee! I'll give a few examples I came up with for jobs that can be droned out -- just by looking around me.

1. Fast Food Workers. Instead of a surly cashier taking your order and then a surlier worker bee behind the counter putting it together -- badly -- you'll walk up to the customer service touchscreen, and punch 1 for Big Mac, 2 for Quarte

Economists seem to agree that robot automation poses real threats to human labour within the next few decades.

Which economist are these? Citation please. I'm not aware of any credible economist who has a blanket view that robots will replace human labor substantially within the next few decades with no alternative work being available. There has not been a single instance in human history where automation has resulted in a long term labor shortage. It causes some short term dislocations in specific industries but those affected always eventually find other work.

the increasing horde of the desperate, hungry, jobless underclass that will still be scolded by CEOs and their lapdog politicians to stop being bums and pull themselves up with their own bootstraps instead of selfishly eating them.

Friend of mine was an absolute wizard in a darkroom - amazing colour perception and memory, an instinct for chemicals/timing combinations that would bring out contrast in bad images. When most darkroom work was automated, his was not - developing large-process prints of airphotos in false colours, that kind of specialty work. But finally all that was gone too, when electronic images started to beat the best that chemicals could do even for specialty needs.

There is no doubt that drones could do many things more efficiently, which would add to the corporate bottom line. However that $127B is predominately paid out to human beings as workers. While it would first appear that the change to the economy is $0, the wages paid out no longer go to the workers, but instead the shareholders. However, the workers use those wages to purchase goods and services that the shareholders typically don't

Normally, it is figured in economics that wages paid to workers are multipl

Human effort is made more productive by technological growth. In the early 1900s, 60% of United States laborers were agricultural workers; we invented tons of new farm technologies, and now 2% of United States workers provide food, fiber (clothing), and biofuels for the US and an export market--and half their output is global exports. Just in 1950, middle-class American families spent over 30% of their household income on food; with advances in agricultural technology replacing humans with technology produced using fewer humans than the technology replaced, people now spend under 12% of their income on food.

Human effort doesn't create wealth; output creates wealth. Technology increases output. The single, simple danger is removing jobs too quickly to replace them: once you've deployed new technology and eliminated the corresponding jobs, wage-labor costs go down, and the minimum price drops; it takes time for market forces (notably inflation pressure and competition--both directly with producers of similar goods and indirectly with *anything* *else* consumers might buy instead of fancy Uggs or tablets or paperback books) to leave the money back in consumer hands, and then laborers have to compete with machines on wage-labor costs.

Minimum wage hikes exacerbate this by speeding the replacement of labor with machines WITHOUT a corresponding reduction in wage-labor cost, thus without increasing consumer buying power: instead of costing $40, a Toaster suddenly costs $55, but we replace the high-wage humans with lower-cost machines to make a $50 toaster. Consumers are no more wealthy, and thus can't buy more stuff, thus can't create new jobs (and, in the case where the cost of labor-replacing machines exceeds the pre-wage-increase cost of human labor, the consumer base becomes *less* capable of sustaining existing jobs, and so more people go unemployed). At the same time, with wage-labor being more expensive, it's harder for consumers to supply the purchasing power to create new jobs for the displaced: your economy gets poorer.

This is why economic policies such as non-wage standard-of-living systems like a Citizen's Dividend need to replace minimum wages. It's also why sales taxes are horrible, payroll taxes are bad, and progressive taxes are the best currently-known tax: sales and payroll tax increase consumer expenditure, thus creating a poorer consumer class and reducing the number of available jobs per consumer; while progressive income taxes allow you to reduce taxes on the working class consumer *without* raising taxes on the rich upper class as the income gap spreads, thus creating a more powerful consumer class and increasing the number of jobs available per consumer.

We need an increase in the take-home pay per wage-dollar expenditure: when your employer spend $1,000 on your salary, you should come home with something closer to $1,000. If you come home with $600, you still have to buy products at prices reflecting a portion of a wage-laborer's $1,000; if you come home with $800, that price is still based on a portion of the same $1,000 of wage-labor, but you're both taking home 1/3 more money out of that cost, and your ability to buy products is increased by that much.

Such policies are not very hard to design; transitioning onto them is the difficult part.

You forgot if output is not sold it doesn't really count.
Inventory build up will only count on value added up to the point that no more value is got.
Output is potential wealth, but is only realized through transaction, so people need to have resources to buy that output.

I didn't forget; the big wall of text is big enough without me describing the entire span of non-fucked-up economic theory, much less the history of economics and how it's evolved to where it reached today.

Inventory build up will only count on value added up to the point that no more value is got.

I don't use the term "value" when describing economics. It's a personal quirk, stemming from having synthesized economic theory in a bubble and then gone back to check against modern theory--a process which gave me a whole lot of useful terms and pinned my own theories to more robust theories, and als

Yeah, anarchy (or pure capitalism) would be a perfect government... if people were perfect. Just like monarchy or absolute rule would be perfect... if leaders were perfect. Since none of us are perfect, we have an imperfect government with checks and balances to try to handle our imperfect people and leaders.

When you find perfect people, let me know. I'd love to see their government in action.

That would be a fantastic idea if it didn't, oh, fly completely in the face of reality.

How about you take a walk around in some of the worlds slums and see what happens when a government basically gives up on you.

If the gov't didn't do education, who would? Nobody, that's who. Individuals don't have the resources for such things.There would be no police. Only armed mercenaries working for the wealthiest people who can afford them.All the possible consequences are too numerous to list, but it boils down to this:

If you yourself aren't already really rich, or part of a rich family, you're screwed. You'd be, at best, nothing more than a serf grovelling in the dirt. There is no in between.

Anyone who thinks "they have a simple solution to a complex problem", is a fantastic example of the Dunning Kruger effect.

An economy, by its nature, must grow by creating unemployment. Unemployment is transitional, and reduces over time as prices move toward costs, leaving buying power in consumer hands. A social safety net is a response to that unemployment.

Economies create unemployment as they grow because creating more stuff per each person happens in one of two ways: somebody works longer hours OR we find a way to produce the same things with fewer hours. If we produce, say, the same amount of food with 90% as many

2 problems with that. An informed market is hard to create when there is a profit to be made by hiding information from people, e.g. credit default swaps. The next problem is that unregulated markets have a natural tendency to becoming captured markets i.e. monopolies.

Regulation and intervention are absolutely necessary to maintain a healthy market.

Note though that over-regulation and well-intentioned but ultimately destructive intervention in markets are also detrimental to a healthy economy.

The best outcome arises from a balance of regulation with a free market. Not too little, not too much. Unfortunately, this being an open-ended problem, the "right amount" of regulation is different for each field, and frequently is different at different times [wikipedia.org]. So the system has to be flexible enough to increase regulation when needed, but reduce it when th

And Amazon isn't going to be flying packages to a world of people who were unemployed by robots

If they won't, Wal-Mart will. Or someone else will, because whoever does it first and does it cheaper will undercut the companies that don't, and will sell to those other companies employees until those other companies roboticize or go out of business. Once all the other companies go out of business?

Except you're forgetting that robots are a very large capital expenditure. That's even assuming that the relevant machines can even do the job. Replacing a job NOT prone to giving you carpal tunnel is much harder. That's part of why it hasn't been done already.

Except you're forgetting that robots are a very large capital expenditure.

Are they? I think for most of the stuff we're talking about, buying a drone is going to be cheaper than hiring a human, let alone the equipment they will need to do the job. This seems especially true for crop dusting, or package delivery. Doing package delivery well is still a tricky job, but doable within existing tech. Crop dusting is trivial, if you are using multicopters. And I strongly suspect that fruit-picking robots are just around the corner, finally... it's getting more expensive to have humans d

When we no longer need very much productive human effort? What happens to the ditch diggers when they're obsolete? If you're OK with them starving to death in a gutter then man up and say so, but don't fool yourself into thinking you've done any less. You can't become the next Einstein just by wanting too and working hard no matter what movie montages told you. In the real world people have limits, and we've got billions of them on they're way to planned obsolescence and mass starvation.

Ultimately, we'll need fewer people. That coincides well with the need to reduce the human population in order to have a better balance in the overall ecosystem. Getting there in a humane way is the challenge.

Why mandatory? As I said, it's completely unnecessary, because the data shows that birth rates fall well below replacement level in every advanced country, and even in less advanced ones. It's a sufficient problem that governments in many countries are concerned not with stopping overpopulation, but just with encouraging enough people to have kids so the population doesn't plummet.

Ideally, the ditch diggers train to operate the robots which dig ditches. We went through this in the 1980s. Robots were starting to enter into manufacturing. The labor unions rebelled and rather than negotiate for retraining, they negotiated to keep the robots out of manufacturing.

Fast forward 20 years, and transportation costs dropped enough that foreign manufacturing + transport was now cheaper than domestic manufacturing by humans. If they'd allowed the robots back in the 1980s and retrained, a l

It is productive human effort that CREATES wealth. I agree that there are an awful lot of people who simply don't know what to do, don't want to learn how to do something new, feel entitled, or need someone to tell them exactly what to do. To all those excuses, I say "tough poop." DO SOMETHING!

And Amazon isn't going to be flying packages to a world of people who were unemployed by robots. Nor is the drone farmer going to sell much food to unemployed field workers. All those people WILL find something to do after a brief period of adjustment because that has happened since the beginning of civilization.

I love the way you simply dismiss that "brief period of adjustment", as if it's simply nothing.

50 years ago, technology replaced a lot of farm workers. We pushed for more humans to obtain education and learn a skill related to technology in order to move on and survive. Today we are finding that technology is being used to replace technology so there are not too many other avenues to turn down or even invent for humans to actually go DO. Robots will build the PC you work on, displacing thousands of jobs. Automation will build and control the car you used to have to drive, displacing thousands of jobs. Drones will deliver all of your sustenance to you, displacing thousands of jobs. AI can and will start replacing teachers, displacing thousands of jobs. Without teachers, you really don't need an army of redundant management, displacing thousands of jobs. (wait, what exactly are we teaching humans to go DO in the future? Uhhh...)

Even something as simple as helping humans communicate with each other will be displaced by the electronic babel fish.

And before we start rambling on about the technology disrupters of yesteryear, buggy whip manufacturers being made obsolete cannot even remotely compare to replacing teachers all over the world. And do not dismiss the speed at which disrupters are coming. Apple's Siri is not even five years old today, and Tesla's all-electric supercars aren't even a decade old yet.

I should note that these coming innovations are not necessarily a bad thing. Humans have a finite amount of time to live (at least as it stands now), so it becomes rather pointless to force a human to drone on for 80% of their life working WAY more hours than humanly necessary. That said, society is not even remotely prepared, and will continue to champion the broken concept that humans must work 40 hours a week doing SOMETHING, else they are considered lazy and non-essential.

Oh, and let me remind you as to what this generation considers "productive human effort". We pay YouTube stars six figures and the Kardashians are worldwide celebrities compared to royalty. I wouldn't exactly label abject narcissism as something that should CREATE wealth or hold value in the future.

Exactly. Not only are these disruptors coming at us pretty fast, but there are a bunch of them that seem to be converging all at once, and unlike in the past they don't look to be capable of creating enough jobs with equivalent income potential to offset the losses they will bring. There is going to have to be a fundamental shift in our view of how government, economies, and income work over the next 30 or so years or we will end up hollowing out the base of the economy (the lower and middle class workforce

Martin Ford in 'The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future' called it the Technology Paradox. Basically an economic collapse due to over automation would defer efforts move forward technologically from that point of advanced automation to the level required for the singularity to occur. Of course that does not take into account a social/economic shift in how we define work and how we distribute wealth. If we moved toward something like a basic income system

Having a machine mow your lawn may be all well and good but if some kid down the road wants to make some money you may be inclined to pay them anyway because it's for a good cause. Machines may be able to plant community gardens but the residents may opt to pay humans to do it instead to get the community involved.

You can learn from books all day long but there's still a market for good teachers.

What will more likely happen is what happens with all "kept" people since the dawn of time: they pursued the art

there are an awful lot of people who simply don't know what to do, don't want to learn how to do something new

Like what? I'd like examples of something that is not at risk of automation and/or offshoring. Programming and managing server farms can and is being offshored. As soon as you reach a certain age, corporations toss you in the trash like a 90's PC found in the closet anyhow. They don't value IT skills enough to keep you past Logan's Run age, so why should that be considered the safe haven from change?

I agree one has to be adaptable these days just to stay in the game, but it appears to be a race to the bottom, to borrow a popular phrase.

If everybody OD'd on caffeine and worked 70 hours a week to "keep up", that's just more intensity chasing a fixed number of positions. It don't see enough slots for each person even if everybody were super smart and super competitive and super-caffeinated.

3rd-world countries subsidize labor to keep their citizens from rioting and overthrowing the leaders. They are thus de-facto slaves. Do we have to turn our country into a 3rd-world dump to compete with 3rd-world dumps and slaves via deregulation and pollution? That's solving the wrong problem: our goal should be a better society, not a society where we compete with subsidized slaves wallowing in gunk by becoming slaves wallowing in gunk.

It is productive human effort that CREATES wealth. I agree that there are an awful lot of people who simply don't know what to do, don't want to learn how to do something new, feel entitled, or need someone to tell them exactly what to do. To all those excuses, I say "tough poop." DO SOMETHING!

And Amazon isn't going to be flying packages to a world of people who were unemployed by robots. Nor is the drone farmer going to sell much food to unemployed field workers. All those people WILL find something to do after a brief period of adjustment because that has happened since the beginning of civilization.

Think about this seriously for a minute and I really want you to answer. You've got some 50 year old guy who along with 20 other people at the same company have been replaced by drones or some other form of automation. It is very easy to say: "DO SOMETHING!", much harder to actually accomplish. Since his company is not the only company replacing workers like him, the chances of getting another job with his current skills is virtually none.

And many more would love to learn to do something, but won't get hired if they don't go the expensive route to learning. Alas, being unemployed, there's not much prospect to pay for that education and keep their family in food, clothing, and shelter for 4 years.

If that whole deal was supported, they would likely do something, even for free. Why are you so determined to turn the great dream into rivers of misery?

First of all, only an idiot tries to live off "interest" from "savings" -- at today's interest rates, that's unsustainable. Living off "returns" from "investments," on the other hand, is entirely reasonable. The key difference is that you accept risk and own productive assets with higher returns (e.g. stock index funds with a long-term average return of 7% or so).

You'll find it takes 20 years to get where you want even saving 50%. You'll find it's worth it, even so. I'm 15 years in, and there are places in America I could retire now, if I wanted to (which makes works significantly less stressful.) Just remember that the young dramatically underestimate the cost of health care when you're old.

I just wish I had the patience and lack-of-laziness to do solid real estate investing (not something one should do half-assed), as the inherent volatility of stock investing

I'm not single. Moreover, I expect to spend much less than the average on child expenses in the same way I spend much less than the average on all my other expenses. For example, I anticipate using cloth diapers, clothes from thrift stores (or maybe even freecycle), having a stay-at-home parent instead of daycare, etc.

There's being optimistic, and there's being both stupid and ignorant of history. There were massive deaths as a result of the enclosure acts. The luddites weren't against the industrial mills because they didn't like machinery, it was because they didn't want to starve to death. I expect the same is true of the sabot-eurs, who threw their wooden shoes (sabots) into the machinery.

Just because the official histories whitewash the events doesn't mean you can't find out what happened if you look. Check out "

No, we create massive value by building robots to do all the work. Then we distribute the value by having every citizen own shares of it.

(By the way: yes, I am aware that most people aren't foresighted enough to invest like that. That's why in reality we'll end up with the government acting as a middle-man, taxing the robot-owners and distributing the proceeds as "basic income" instead. Not that there's anything really wrong with that, as long as we minimize the administrative costs...)

How does a new person enter this system? Say a new baby is born and the baby eventually grows up but has no income so how does he invest into the system to become an owner? For the sake of simplicity let's say this is a child whose unknown mother died during childbirth so he's an orphan with no way of inheriting anything.

The isn't enough land on the planet to support the current population at subsistence farming. It's much less productive/acre than is industrial farming, even industrial organic farming. E.g., irrigation makes so much difference you wouldn't believe it, but most areas cannot be irrigated except via industrial farming methods. Otherwise you need to be right beside a river or persistent creek.

Even Babylon couldn't have been developed without primitive industrial farming methods. They've got two rivers ther

Automation does require routine maintenance to perform at peak efficiency. As the bean counters have proven countless times, skimping on the maintenance budget is to increase profits is perfectly acceptable. Sooner or later, something breaks in an extraordinary way and fixing the problem becomes an expensive, time consuming issue.

Show me where it says they have to find something else because it's happened that way before.

A hundred years ago, a city may have a 100 street sweepers to clean up the roads. A dozen street sweeping trucks can do the same job today (assuming that the bean counters haven't persuaded the city to cut the street sweeping budget to save money and let citizens sweep their own roads). Automated street sweeping trucks may require a handful of people to operate.

OTOH, These doom-and-gloom stories about massive unemployment due to automation has become quite popular in the press as of late. Those virtual news

Economists seem to agree that robot automation poses real threats to human labour within the next few decades.

They're misquoting economists and putting their own spin on it. There aren't any economists listed on the linked page as authors of the paper.

You can tell that right off, because no reputable economist would phrase technological efficiency and labor savings as a "real threats to human labour", as opposed to increases in efficiency resulting in higher growth and wealth.

Look back at circa 1900. Much travel and agriculture was by horse. Horse manure in city streets was a constant presence and problem, causing disease.

Today, horses are much reduced. Horse population in the US peaked at 25 million in the 1920s, then began a steady decline. By the 1960s, the population was down to 3 million. Since then the population has grown to about 7 million today, a far cry from the peak. For agriculture, tractors have all kinds of advantages. Not least is that the tractor can be

Of course we should and we will be doing something different. The question is how that is going to happen. And history shows it's not going to happen through government intervention, it's going to happen through free market innovation. Government intervention in such "crises" tends to be not just ineffective, but often even harmful.

Guaranteed minimum income is probably the way to go. It reduces the need for a lot of other things, including lots of existing bureaucracy. It also eliminates the need for minimum wage laws, since if everyone already gets enough for a living wage, any additional income would by nature be purely discretionary.
It also guarantees that the economy will continue to have the necessary demand signaling to keep markets functional and not skewed out of proportion.

"What's going to be in the cockpit of the future?"
"A dog and a pilot."
"A dog? Why a dog?"
"Well, the dog is there to keep the pilot from touching anything."
"Ummm, why have the pilot then?"
"Well, someone has to feed the dog!

Drones are unmanned. They need safety, but not the same sort. While a manned plane needs to be able to safely land above all else, all a drone needs is the ability to crater an empty field if it has a problem.

But funny you mention pilots. We have already downsized the crew by 33% by automating the flight engineer out of the picture. Next step, the plane flys on auto most of the time and we do away with the co-pilot.

My complaint is that people like you think that, magically, by making them "drones" that the roles and responsibilities of the pilot go away. Yet, you don't offer any suggestion about what or who replaces those functions.

If the aircraft is operated only in a more limited context, for example it doesn't have to be flown between your property and an airfield, or at any significant height, then the responsibilities decrease. And if you shrink it, they decrease still more. Instead of using one big aircraft for crop dusting, you'll use several smaller ones. Or instead of getting it done in two hours, you'll use one smaller one and it can take eight hours because no pilot is involved and you don't have to pay them.

I believe that by having drones, a large number of things that are required on an airplane as safety measures for the pilot and passengers go away. Things like parachutes, oxygen, seats, visible warnings, windows, life vests, and so forth.

A pilot on the ground doesn't risk depressurization, having to bail out, doing as extensive of a checklist (since a drone is much simpler then a plane in a lot of way, since many systems simply exist to keep the pilot aware, or keep the people in the plane alive).

Nobility lives in the lap of automated luxury and you and me live in an automated prison camp until they decide to terminate us. After all, we aren't humans, we are human resources, and those are no longer needed. Just look at how much resentment social security is currently getting.

I wonder if that's the Great Filter [wikipedia.org]: not war but simply the logic of industrial capitalism taken to its conclusion.

The problem is it's not a one-to-one movement of labor in this case. I don't need one repair person per drone. Or even one per 100. In the past we were able to move that labor from ag to manufacturing, and the output from that manufacturing created new industries with labor needs. There isn't a whole lot of that type of outgrowth in this case. We aren't creating new industries here. We are, for the most part, taking existing ones (delivery in this case) and changing them in place.